Arab Spring: Tech as tinder

The Internet tools of the Arab Spring have become the weapons of a new Arabian nightmare playing out at American diplomatic missions across North Africa and the Middle East.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that spread an obscure movie trailer depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in offensive ways are facing a clamp-down from governments and even Internet companies in some cases.

Story Continued Below

Google-owned YouTube has blocked access to the video from inside Libya and Egypt. President Hamid Karzai has set up a firewall to prevent Afghans from viewing YouTube videos at all. And the U.S. Embassy in Cairo deleted its own tweets about the video after they became part of the political debate in the American presidential election.

These social media platforms were hailed as the tinder for the democratic revolutions that swept across the Arab world beginning in late 2010 — revolutions that the U.S. government supported. But the power of these social media platforms is coming under new scrutiny in the midst of the wave of protests and the attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, earlier this week.

Whatever the motivation for the attacks, the free flow of information at the heart of American democracy is no longer aligning with U.S. interests abroad. The fringe views of a Florida pastor, which might once have been ignored because he had no real platform for them, are now weighty enough to contribute to violence halfway across the world.

YouTube, which determined through an internal process earlier this year not to take the video offline, decided on Wednesday to block access to it from Egypt and Libya, according to a source familiar with company policies.

"We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere," a company spokesperson said. "This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt, we have temporarily restricted access in both countries."

Rather than rifle-shot efforts to stop certain videos or tweets, some countries simply ban the platforms outright, such as Afghanistan under Karzai.

The U.S. government, cognizant of First Amendment speech protections, has denounced the video but avoided public condemnation of the social media tools that make it available across the world.

"This video is disgusting and reprehensible,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday in remarks carried by CNN. “The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.”